The wind thief vanished.., p.12
The Wind Thief (Vanished, #4), page 12
So many places to look. Look outside. Look inside. To the Diné Bahaneʼ, the story of our creation, and to the Turquoise Mountain of today, which the white man calls Mount Taylor. “Is there anywhere I shouldn’t look, cousins?” I ask, unable to keep a wry smile from thinning my lips.
Both men laugh. It’s a good sound, defiant, but it soon fades. Our gazes return to the fire. Nothing more needs to be said, least of all what I know passes unspoken between all four of us.
Time is short. And we may already be too late.
11
THE WALKER
Riding along inside the mind of my dead grandmother has me feeling very queasy. Or maybe that’s just Chaco mucking around in my ghost guts, making all this possible.
I hear him chime in from nowhere and everywhere. “You still with me, Walker?”
“I don’t know who I’m with,” I say, “or where or when.” I take a few deep breaths to try to fight down the sudden sense of vertigo hitting me as I see Gam’s life unfolding as it did twenty years ago out of my left eye and this Windway from hell out of my right.
“You gotta stop thinking about time as a line, man,” Chaco says—or Blackfeather or whoever he is right now. “You are here and there and everywhere, but you’re still you. Remember that.”
Grant is still here, too, surrounded by family but trapped. And not by Dark Sky or Hosteen Bodrey. He’s trapped by Kai. None of them are restrained in any way I can see—but her very presence is a type of handcuff all the same, one Grant clicked on himself. He’s determined to bring her home.
I see the hogan fire for what it is now. In the living plane, it is a ceremonial firepit, cut pine resting on a bed of simmering coals that smokes high into the night sky. But in the space between, it is a roaring bonfire of white wind that bakes the desert ground to cracking. These cracks run underneath all the Dinétah. And if you followed them, I bet you’d end up at Knifepoint on the Turquoise Mountain, the anchor my grandmother fought to save.
“Are we too late?” I ask. “Is the anchor already broken?”
Dark Sky is threading his white smoke around everyone like puppet strings. He’s staying clear of Grant, Joey, and Owen for now but only because Caroline seems to give the white smoke pause.
The bottom line is that I failed. I’m not Gam. I’m a bad Navajo. I let my own backyard go to shit, and now it’s come back to haunt me, and I’m gonna get the entire Rez wiped out.
Chaco chimes in from behind my eyes. “Your grandmother thought she’d failed too.”
“But she did it. She sang it back. I can’t do that. For one, it can’t hear me. Nothing in the living world can.”
I feel Chaco holding something back.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
I feel him guarding his thoughts even as he says, “She did whatever it took, Walker. That’s all you need to know right now. But she didn’t do it alone. She had help from the feather and from her friends.”
“The Walker doesn’t have friends. This is a solo gig.”
Chaco scoffs. “Get over yourself. You don’t really believe that.”
I look at Caroline and Owen, together with Grant, each drawing strength from the others. I look at Joey, who seems half an inch away from throwing what little caution he still possesses straight into that hogan fire and going after Dark Sky himself on whatever plane he can for as long as he can hold up before the wind or the desperate crowd takes him down.
“Look closer,” Chaco says. “Around his neck.”
The feather. Joey wears the crow feather around his neck. The hot wind flutters it lightly against his chest.
“She gave it to Joey,” I say. “But when? I think I would have noticed if—”
“We’re wasting time, man. Every second Dark Sky sings, his power over this place—over these people—grows stronger.”
“Okay, fine,” I snap back. “Joey’s got the feather. So what? We don’t even know which mountain is failing. It could be all of them.”
“You know which one.”
And I do, of course. Turquoise Mountain. All things come again. And I also know I’m only pissed at Chaco because the time has come to make a decision that will force the people I love to act, and they only have to do it because I screwed up at my job and let this thing in where he shouldn’t be.
The only thing that stings worse than screwing something up badly is having to watch other people clean up my mess, people I love.
“It’ll take all of them,” I say. “Joey for sure. But Grant, too, with the bell. Caroline and Owen as well. They’d never let him go without them. All right. Let’s do it. Whatever needs to be done. You and me.”
“About that… I can’t go,” Chaco says. “I couldn’t then, and I can’t now. The wind breaks me down, blows me off course.” His voice gets smaller for a second. “Believe me, I’ve tried.”
I wait for more, but Chaco doesn’t give it.
“Well, that’s just great,” I say.
“It is what it is. I wish it was different.”
I look around myself, helpless. My hands ball into fists. I try to focus on the problem at hand just like I used to when I got thrown curveball after curveball as a cop with the NNPD, but I can’t keep a single line of thought. I’m here at the Rez, but I’m a hundred other places every second, too, and I used to be able to do this—do everything at once—but now, my brain feels like a well running dry.
Panic blows across my body, hot then cold like the desert wind, and I’m reminded of a snapshot of my living life when I felt this way before. I was at my desk in the station, giving a written statement about that terrible night when Ana disappeared and Joey ran. I was doing my best to piece together the timeframe when an awful pressure built up in my brain. I remember trying to focus on the task at hand, but the focus just wouldn’t come to me, and the same thought occurred to me then that occurs to me now.
“Chaco, I don’t think I’m doing so great… in my brain.”
I really want to hear Chaco reply with some wry comment that I’m imagining things, maybe to feel the soft weight of him bop against me in that way he sometimes does that says, Chill out—you’re fine.
Instead, he says, “We can deal with that later.”
And his voice isn’t quiet, exactly, or sad, really. But it’s careful. It’s very careful. And in that second, I know I’m right.
I’m losing my mind. Slowly, yeah. But it’s happening.
The moment has a clarifying effect, as though by admitting it, I push a little bit of the panic away. I’ve had my problems, both alive and dead, but I’ve always owned up to them.
Chaco steps carefully to the front of my mind, like he’s walking down a cracked and pitted sidewalk. “Right now, we need to get all four of them to Knifepoint on the Turquoise Mountain.”
Focusing is hard. I have to pull a lot of myself back from all points of the globe, which is a bit like getting dressed with my eyes closed when I’m pissed off, which I am. My job did this to me. My sneaky shit job has been taking bits of me away from myself all this time, boiling my brain by degrees.
I take several deep breaths, calculating distances. Think of the logistics. Caroline, Owen, and Joey could phase there in an instant, but not Grant, and they won’t leave Grant. Mount Taylor is at least an hour and a half away.
“How are we gonna get Grant there?” I ask.
Chaco stops at the pit of my chest. His weight shifts me forward a bit like a runner at the starting gate. “He can handle that truck of his pretty well,” Chaco says. “He’ll get there fast enough. If he can outrun Dark Sky and this mob.”
One look at Grant says as much. He has a look about him even now that reminds me a lot of Joey. Both of them want to turn the tables here, and they want to do it now. They just don’t know how.
“That kid would’ve had a great time counting coup with Joey and me back in the day,” I say. Of course, he isn’t a kid anymore and hasn’t been for some time. I wonder if this is what parents feel like when, suddenly, they snap back to reality and find themselves clapping at their son’s graduation or crying at his wedding or packing up the car to send him off into the world.
“We need a distraction,” Chaco says, and I feel him climbing up inside me.
“Wait!” I gag, scratching at my chest. Choking aside, having him in there wasn’t so bad. The company was kinda nice.
“I can’t go to the Turquoise Mountain, Walker,” he says, at my throat now. “But I can make a distraction.”
I dry heave as his feathers slide against the back of my tongue.
“Help them if you can,” he says. “It will help with…”
With my fractured head. My lost time.
I try to ask how I’m supposed to do that, being dead and all, but all that comes out is a rattly gasp.
Chaco perches for flight, his claws braced against my lower teeth. “Good luck, Walker.”
Then he launches from my mouth.
12
GRANT ROMER
The bell knows it was almost snatched away. It feels heavier now, like it wants to sink into me. Warmer too. It gets like this when things are happening just outside of our sight.
Dark Sky’s words still ring in my ears. “When the time comes, you’ll give it to me.”
Hos is staring bullets at the bell and at me. He’s still holding his fingers like it stung him where he grabbed it, but he looks like he wants to try again anyway. Only Dark Sky’s orders keep him seated.
Dark Sky knows what Hos doesn’t. The bell only works right when it’s given freely. Anyone who takes it messes up the balance. Shit breaks.
When Chaco vanished, Dark Sky smiled. He moved back to his sandpainting like that was all the evidence he needed that he had everything figured out. He’s carefully sifting black sand into the jagged outline of a snake, singing to himself in a low rumble while sweat drips from his brow onto the painting.
He sure as hell looks pleased with himself. Confident that whatever signal the bell sent out fell on deaf ears. He thinks the danger has passed. But he ain’t lived with the bell, not like me.
If he did, he’d know the danger never really passes.
Dark Sky said the bell is nothing but a tool. That I may be the Keeper, but it isn’t mine, and maybe he’s right. But that’s only part of the story. I may not own the bell, but it sure as shit owns me. That’s what people don’t realize about this whole arrangement.
Once the secret of what this thing can do gets out, the Keeper is never safe. Nobody I love is safe either. All we can do is run when we have to. Lay low when we don’t. It happened with the agents, and it happened with Coyote, and every time we get out of trouble, I think maybe we’re home free.
We ain’t.
I look carefully into the faces of the people I love, boxed right in here next to me, and I can’t help wondering if each time the bell brings trouble down, they think of me a little bit less as Grant and a little bit more as the Keeper.
Or in Kai’s case, maybe she’s not seeing me at all anymore. I try to tell myself that’s because she’s not right. Dark Sky has her under some sort of spell, something cutting her ties to me. But fire can’t exist without smoke, and the bell hanging around my neck simmers day after day. One day, that look Kai is giving me now is how Mom and Dad and Joey and everyone will look at me.
I won’t be Grant anymore. I’ll be the Keeper. And that’s it. The world needs a Keeper more than it needs a Grant. And the world gets what it wants.
I know I’m spiraling. Usually, my bird talks me back up, but even my bird up and left me, and this bell is getting so damn heavy. That witch fire in the middle of the hogan pulls at it. The black bear totem sitting in the coals grows brighter and brighter, and all around us, the night gets heavier. Only Dark Sky seems immune. He nods to himself as he finishes the snake piece of the sandpainting and moves back to the bowls that make up his colors.
Joey sags and shifts to his other knee. Mom and Dad lean against one another. Hell, we don’t even need Hos and his squad to keep us here. Pretty soon, whatever magic Dark Sky is weaving will trap us here just like we were chained to the desert floor.
“Fine time for Chaco to go on a joyride,” Owen mutters, wiping his brow and unbuttoning his collar.
“He was here,” Mom whispers. “Ben. I felt him.”
“Maybe,” Joey says. “But if he was, he’s gone now.”
“So we’re status quo, then,” Owen says. “Wonderful. Nice of him to drop by. The problem is we’re still trapped inside a crowd that some cult leader has induced to mass psychogenic illness.”
“These people aren’t crazy,” Mom says. “They’re… detached. The color of their smoke is bleeding out, turning white.”
“Windway or not, Dark Sky calls upon the gods,” says Joey. “I think the gods are coming.”
Dad rubs at his temples. “This is textbook mass hysteria. Just like the Dancing Plague of 1815. That’s all.”
“Can’t it be a bit of both?” Mom asks, placing a hand on his.
Dad looks at it and her and at this whole place like he’s totally lost, like the desert he’s crisscrossed in the Old Boat for over a decade just shifted under him and he ended up somewhere he has no business being.
“No,” he says. “Not for me. It can’t be stress-induced hysteria brought on by ungodly living conditions and also a magical group abduction. It’s the former.” When Mom presses down gently on his hand, he pulls it away. “And I’ll tell you why. Because what I see in all those people, I’ve been seeing here in some form or another for ten years.”
“Soothe the symptom,” Mom says, seeking Dad’s eyes again, trying to pull him back in. She waits for him to finish the routine I’ve heard them toss back and forth countless times, but he won’t.
So I do. “But treat the cause.”
I know what Dad’s thinking. He gets like this when he feels he can’t help. When he reaches into his doctor’s bag of tricks and comes up emptyhanded, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. We all spiral in our own ways. I want to tell him that he doesn’t have to be a doctor to make a difference here. He makes a difference every day just by being Owen, by being Dad.
But when I try to speak, the bell gets really heavy, and I grab it reflexively. It’s hot in the way that tells me to keep my eyes open.
“Somethin’s comin’,” I whisper.
At first, the hogan gets really quiet. Dark Sky stops singing. Even the fire seems to pull down on itself. My eyes water. I work my jaw and swallow hard, and when my ears pop, I can hear something, the distant sound of beating wings, coming from everywhere and nowhere. It gets louder and louder until the line of firelight just beyond the hogan bends, like two giant fingers pinched the black horizon together just for a second.
A thin, black line rips the air then twists in on itself until it becomes Chaco, fully extended, wings as wide as a desert vulture’s, comin’ at us like he had a football field worth of running room. The size of him, the sheer force of him hitting the air, bowls back damn near everybody.
Only Dark Sky seems unfazed.
He rises from sitting cross-legged in a single, fluid motion and opens his arms, smiling like a lunatic. “You can try me, Thinning, but you know you will break against me. I am almost as old as you.”
I reach out desperately to Chaco with my mind, aiming to tell him not to do it, to say there’s gotta be another way. He needs to know that I’m sorry I thought he left me, that I know he’s always there when I need him most.
I aim to tell him that I love him.
But in the moment, no words come out, only a choppy yell that’s all of it and none of it at once.
Chaco’s voice overpowers me anyway, and I only hear one thing, bouncin’ like an echo down the canyon.
“Get everyone to the Turquoise Mountain.”
I flinch at the strength of the words in a voice I’ve never heard him use before, like one of his old voices from another time. It’s a command.
He’s careening toward Dark Sky, and the crazy Singer seems to grow broader before my eyes. The wind kicks up around him, and I know he’s right when he says Chaco is gonna end up on the bad end of this fight. I scream out warning in both thought and word and reach for him like I might be able to catch him before he breaks against Dark Sky, but before he hits, Chaco dives.
He dives straight into the fire. His talons rip through the sparks and hot white coals and rake angry red lines in the baked sand that glow like fired steel. He grabs something, the black bear totem. In the explosion of fire and smoke, it seems to roar in his grasp, but his talons are sharp and cinched like knots as he leaps high, wings beating a downdraft that scatters the sparks as he passes right over Dark Sky.
“Run!” he shouts in that same ancient voice, then he bursts into flames.
I don’t know how long I stare at him flaming in the sky. I know that the one thing I don’t do is exactly what he said I should—not, at least, until Joey grabs me under the arms and pulls me away from the hogan like some sort of frozen doll, heels draggin’ in the dirt. And still, I watch. I can’t do nothin’ else.
You think when get somethin’ precious taken away from you, somethin’ you really care about, that you’ll scream when it happens. Fight for it. Rage against it. Maybe it’s your mom or dad, maybe your wife or kids. In the dark nights, worst-case scenarios run through your head about how you might lose everything. That’s your brain preparing best it can. Putting you in that headspace like a test run, but a test run is just that. Pretend.
When terrible things actually happen, like when Pap got knifed by those agents that awful day a lifetime ago and I saw the only blood family I had left die in front of me, my body took the loss, not my brain. And that isn’t something you can prepare for. The brain practices no-contact, but the body is in the game. You learn that the first time you get hit.
The day the agents killed Pap, they also tried to kill Chaco. But Chaco is a hard thing to kill. He’s a lot more than just a bird. So even though they broke his neck, he eventually twisted it right again, and since then, I thought he’d be with me forever. That nothing can kill him.
